Number 9…
1
The [overpopulated] world’s forgotten greenhouse gas
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210603-nitrous-oxide-the-worlds-forgotten-greenhouse-gas
Share using EmailShare on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on Linkedin(Image credit: Getty Images)
By Ula Chrobak3rd June 2021FromKnowable MagazineEmissions of the greenhouse gas commonly known as laughing gas are soaring. Can we cut emissions from its greatest anthropogenic source?I
In the world’s effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the source of our food is coming into the spotlight. There’s good reason for that:Agriculture accounts for 16 to 27% of human-caused climate-warming emissions.But much of these emissions are not from carbon dioxide, that familiar climate change villain. They’re from another gas altogether: nitrous oxide (N2O).
Also known as laughing gas, N2O does not get nearly the attention it deserves, says David Kanter, a nutrient pollution researcher at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, an organisation focused on nitrogen pollution research and policy making. “It’s a forgotten greenhouse gas,”…
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Arctic sea ice thinning twice as fast as thought, study finds
Less ice means more global heating, a vicious cycle that also leaves the region open to new oil extraction
Damian CarringtonEnvironment editor@dpcarringtonFri 4 Jun 2021 01.01 EDT
Sea ice across much of theArcticis thinning twice as fast as previously thought, researchers have found.
Arctic ice is melting as the climate crisis drives up temperatures, resulting in a vicious circle in which more dark water is exposed to the sun’s heat, leading to even more heating of the planet.
The faster ice loss means the shorter north-eastern shipping passage from China to Europe will become easier to navigate, but it also means new oil and gas extraction is more feasible.
Calculating the thickness of sea ice from satellite radar…
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Playing Russian Roulette with Grizzly Matron 399 and the Bears of Yellowstone
MAY 24, 2021
BY LOUISA WILLCOXFacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Photo by Tom Mangelsen.
This is the first of a two-part essay on the famous bear matron of Jackson Hole, Grizzly 399, and the mounting threats she and other grizzlies face. Part 2 will focus on a path forward. You might also want to listen to a fascinating Grizzly Times podcast (2 episodes) with renowned photographer Tom Mangelsen, who waxes eloquent about his 15-year relationship with this special bear and his advocacy for the wild.
Few if any animals have been more celebrated than 399, the matron grizzly bear of Grand Teton National Park. Each year, families flock to Jackson Hole hoping to catch a glimpse of her shepherding her latest brood – now four irrepressible yearlings. Her grown-up daughter, Grizzly 610, accompanied by two pre-adolescent cubs now as large as she is, generates almost as much excitement. Today, about 10 grizzlies of 399’s lineage make their living along Jackson Hole’s roads in the company of people.
With a global fan club, Grizzly 399 is an ambassador for grizzlies everywhere. Her tolerance for people is legendary. To cross a road, she is known to look both ways before threading through parked cars and mobs of delighted onlookers, as doors slam and kids shriek – placidly returning to fetch a cub still wrestling with a road cone. Who could still cling to the myth that grizzlies are vicious man-eaters after beholding the ways of 399?
But as the fame of these roadside grizzlies had grown, so have the crowds. Current systems to keep visitors and grizzlies safe are breaking down. As summer tourist season begins with a vengeance, officials are often either nowhere to be seen — or they are firing projectiles at bears in a cruel, disorganized, and futile effort to haze grizzlies rather than manage people.
Not long ago 399 and her four youngsters were swarmed by 300 people – with no Park Ranger in sight. And 610, known as an especially protective mom, bluffed charged two tourists out of a mob of 150 who got too close. East of the park, 863 (aka “Felicia”) and her adorable new cubs face a tsunami of people, cracker shells fired by state managers, as well as semis barreling down the adjacent highway at 70 miles an hour.
Anywhere grizzlies are visible we are seeing scenes of bedlam and terrifying close calls – and tourist season has just begun. Last year, record numbers of people — throngs numbering as many as 1000 — gathered any time 399 or other roadside grizzlies appeared. The spectacle lasted from Memorial Day to New Year’s Day, when 399 broke trail for her youngsters through chest-deep snow to reach her den.
Caring citizens, most of them veteran photographers and wildlife watchers, are doing what they can to keep tourists from crowding Jackson Hole’s grizzlies. Last year these citizen volunteers saved the lives of 399, 610 and other grizzlies many times. So did Wyoming Game and Fish biologist Mike Boyce, who spent long days and nights trying to keep 399 safe as she ventured south of the town of Jackson onto private lands.
But these efforts are a drop in the bucket of a sea of need. This summer we can expect another valence shift in tourism as pent-up families seek beauty, solace and adventure in our National Parks. With ever more airlines servicing the Yellowstone and Grand Teton region, another record-breaking year of visitation is virtually guaranteed – and with it, more pressure on the region’s world-class wildlife.
When I asked veteran Jackson News and Guide reporter Mike Kosmrl what he thought this summer would bring for Grand Teton’s grizzlies, he offered one word: “chaos.”
This chaos surrounding 399 and her offspring highlights the threats posed by so many people, compounded by long-neglected deficiencies in grizzly bear management. Courageous government action is urgently needed – on behalf of not just grizzlies, but also on behalf of the multitudes who care about these wild animals.
Grizzly 399’s Unique Strategy: Depending on the Kindness of Strangers
Grizzly 399 makes her living near people, teaching generations of cubs how to live amicably along roads and around recreation areas. Her main reason for settling into these human-impacted environments is to keep her cubs safe from aggressive male grizzlies—known as boars—that often prefer to hang out in more remote areas.
For her and other female grizzlies who frequent roadsides, staying near people is a better bet than mixing it up with boars who can and will kill cubs. Every day, these females and their offspring literally depend on the kindness of strangers, to borrow from Blanche Dubois’ famous line in A Streetcar Named Desire.
To these grizzlies, people are allies – even, at times, babysitters. This should not surprise us given the stories told for millennia by Native Peoples throughout the Northern Hemisphere about humans living among bears, saved by bears, even marrying bears.
We know more about 399 than most grizzly bears because she has lived her long life so close to us. Tom Mangelsen, a world-famous photographer, has photo-documented his 15-year relationship with this special bear, co-writing a lovely book about her.
A successful and attentive mom, 399 is the quintessential mother with muffins in the oven. She birthed and successfully raised three sets of triplets. And last year, she performed a miracle when she emerged with quadruplets at the age of twenty-four – ancient for a mother bear. Her feat is especially noteworthy given that only eight litters of quadruplets have been documented in the Yellowstone ecosystem since 1983.
We cannot forget the difference that one good mom can make. All existing Yellowstone grizzly bears are the decedents of perhaps only 50 females alive during the early 1980’s. Every mom matters. And a female such as 399 is an Olympian.
But despite her competence as a mother, so far 399 has raised only two females who have also had cubs, Grizzlies 610 and 962, the latter just appearing with a new cub. The reasons are straight-forward. Grizzly bear birth rates are inherently low and many of 399’s offspring have been killed by humans.
But humans can be benevolent. There is no doubt that 399 would not still be with us were it not for the dedication of the Park Service. Indeed, a past superintendent of Grand Teton Park, Mary Scott, spared 399’s life when, as a young mom with cubs, she mauled a jogger who came too close as she fed upon a dead elk. Since then, with the help of volunteers who comprise its Bear Brigade, Grand Teton Park has tried to ensure that everybody — bears and humans — stays safe.
But the crush of park visitors is overwhelming agency capacity. Despite clear warning signs that this year would see record tourism, government agencies are again on their back heel. They have also failed to adapt to the tangible impacts of a warming climate, which is prompting bears to be up long before the Brigade is typically assembled and long after it disbands for the season.
Moreover, when 399 steps outside the borders of the National Parks, she enters a more dangerous world.
The Perils of an Olympian Mom
Much of 399’s home range lies outside the protected landscapes of Grand Teton Park. She dens and forages on Bridger Teton National Forest lands that abut the park. The Forest is a deadlier environment because it is managed for “multiple use,” meaning mostly for the benefit of hunters, ranchers, off-road vehicle users and increasingly, mountain bikers. Not surprisingly, one of 399’s cubs, Grizzly 587, was killed by managers after depredating cows on a Forest Service grazing allotment, where notoriously anti-grizzly ranchers dominate management of public lands that are ostensibly owned by all citizens.
399 must also dodge poachers who often are undeterred by the hefty penalties that can be levied under the Endangered Species Act — but too often are not. Indeed, one of her daughters, Grizzly 615, aka Persistence, was gunned down illegally as she ate a moose carcass on National Forest land close to the Park border.
She and other bears such as Grizzly 863 must also avoid being splattered on the roads as trucks and tourists speed to their next destination. And even inside Grand Teton Park, roads are dangerous. Two of 399’s cubs have been killed by vehicle collisions.
399 must, moreover, navigate private lands, dogs, compost piles, beehives, garbage and more. Even in Jackson, where wildlife is abundant, too many people still unthinkingly contribute to destroying bears by poorly managing food and garbage. One woman has continued to feed grizzlies and other wildlife despite government efforts to dissuade her. The results are predictable. One of 399’s cubs, Grizzly 964, developed such a bad garbage habit that she was relocated last summer to the north end of the ecosystem.
And now 399 and other roadside bears must dodge projectiles fired from shotguns, part of an ill-conceived, haphazard and doomed effort by the Park Service to haze her and other grizzlies away from the roadside environment they depend on.
Of Riot Control and Half Measures
With the Park Service understaffed and its Bear Brigade not fully assembled, the agency is floundering to deal with crowds gathering long before Memorial Day, the traditional kickoff date for summer tourist season. But instead of expanding its program and more aggressively managing the people, government officials are taking out their anxiety on innocent bears by shooting them with rubber bullets and rock salt or dosing them with bear spray when they near roads. The effort is erratic and disorganized, with contradictory messages to the public about what the agency is doing and why. (The Park Service did not respond to an interview request by deadline).
Such riot control tactics will fail, even as they harm the bears. Roadside females are more terrified of male bears in the backcountry that might eat their cubs than they are of the poorly implemented and ill-thought-out hazing efforts. Grizzlies such as 399 and 610 have long relied on limited roadside habitats and cannot—more importantly will not—just pick up and relocate.
Many roadside bears would rather suffer the punishment of rubber bullets, no matter how severe, than mix it up with aggressive bears that can be a mortal threat. Proving this point, years ago one black bear was actually bludgeoned to death by rubber bullets while cowering along a narrow strip of habitat along a road in Yellowstone Park. And hazing is deeply stressful and confusing to the animals. As anyone who has trained or rescued a dog knows well, stress and fear can make animals more unpredictable and aggressive towards people.
Furthermore, an effective hazing program is extraordinarily difficult to implement. Negative experiences need to be unrelenting and consistent if bears are to learn to avoid specific environs such as roadsides. Execution of such a program requires resources, discipline, and skill on the part of managers—something that has never been achieved before. Without this mix of ingredients, hazing programs devolve into little more than the gratuitous infliction of pain on targeted bears. And bears are intelligent, which makes the job even harder. In Yellowstone, grizzlies targeted for hazing quickly learned to disappear when the green Park Service trucks arrived and return to the roadsides when they left.
The Park Service is hardly the only agency failing these bears and the broader public who care about their well-being. Others with authority over grizzlies include the state of Wyoming, Bridger Teton National Forest, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Wyoming Department of Transportation, and Teton County.
Importantly, the state of Wyoming dictates wildlife management on nonpark lands. State managers have long been hostile towards large predators such as grizzlies, seen as competitors for elk and moose. In the zero-sum calculous of state managers, any elk or moose killed by a predator translates into lost hunting-license revenues. As problematic, those predators that managers do allow to live are seen as little more than grist for the mill of trophy hunting. It is no surprise that state managers resent celebrity roadside grizzlies because, beloved by nonhunters, these bears represent an alien and even existential threat.
The fundamentally antagonistic view of Wyoming Game and Fish towards these bears and their fans has been on full display on Togwotee Pass in recent days, where officials are exploding cracker shells at Felicia and her newborns and imposing erratic constraints on viewers. (Wyoming Game and Fish did not respond to an interview request by deadline). Wyoming Game and Fish large carnivore specialist Dan Thompson, who is in charge of these efforts, made his view clear several years ago, saying: “Habituation towards people and the roadside bear situation, it’s not something that we’re supportive of.”
Gutted by budget cuts, the Bridger Teton Forest is also ill-equipped to manage mounting numbers of recreational users on forest lands near Grand Teton Park, even as the agency continues to shirk its legal duty to conserve wildlife. Similarly, Teton County has struggled to ensure meaningful sanitation on private lands. And Wyoming Department of Transportation has done precious little to improve safe passage for wildlife, in contrast to successful systems of overpasses and underpasses built in Montana’s Flathead Valley and in Canada’s National Parks.
But the agency with the clearest legal authority to help these bears is the one that is most conspicuously absent: the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The Endangered Species Act charges FWS with recovering threatened species, using the best available science in decision-making, and ensuring that federal and state agencies take a precautionary approach in decisions affecting protected species. Despite this duty, the FWS has done little lately other than sanction the killing and relocating of grizzlies that are increasingly deemed to be “surplus” by FWS managers.
Thankfully, citizen volunteers have been stepping into the breach.
Into the Breach
In recent years, concerned citizens, most of them photographers, have been helping manage tourists at often understaffed wildlife jams – and they are up to their eyeballs this spring. Too numerous to count, citizens routinely step in to slow traffic and keep tourists from getting too close, literally saving not only people who are careless, but also the lives of roadside bears. Any time a person gets injured, the involved bear almost invariably pays the ultimate price.
Recognizing the scale of the need, last winter, photographers Jack and Gina Bayles created Team 399 to raise money through donations and the sale of merchandise to help support Grand Teton Park’s Wildlife Brigade, through the Park’s nonprofit arm, Grand Teton Park Foundation. They are hoping that contributions from these bears’ enormous social media following can be channeled into work to help keep them safe.
This summer Team 399 is also partnering with Friends of the Bridger Teton National Forest, the nonprofit private adjunct of the Forest, to sponsor additional seasonal staff to help educate and manage roadside throngs of bear-watchers in Felicia’s haunts along Highway 287 on Togwotee Pass. After a successful foray last year, Friends of the Bridger Teton has again hired two roadside bear ambassadors to help manage viewers along this hazardous stretch of highway.
Meanwhile, other local organizations are engaged in complementary work. The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation is working with Wyoming Department of Transportation to improve signage along area roads. Greater Yellowstone Coalition has been working with the Bridger Teton Forest to increase the number of bear-resistant storage boxes at campsites. Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, Wyoming Untrapped and Cougar Fund work to raise awareness of the value of large carnivores, especially grizzlies, wolves and mountain lions. And Friends of 760, named for a grandson of 399 who was killed as a result of government bungling, is working to make sure similar mistakes do not happen again.
But while citizens and nonprofit groups can help immeasurably, they lack legal authority and anything close to adequate resources to tackle the crisis facing grizzlies around Jackson. The government must step in — immediately and in a much bigger way — on behalf of the public trust and threatened grizzlies that will always depend on the kindness of strangers.
Part 2 outlines a path forward to ensure that 399 and the other grizzlies of Greater Yellowstone flourish.
Louisa Willcox is a longtime grizzly bear activist and founder of Grizzly Times. She lives in Montana.
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Gosport man acquitted of any wrongdoing in a hunting accident
Gosport man acquitted of any wrongdoing in a hunting accident
Gosport man acquitted of any wrongdoing in a hunting accident
MAY 18, 2021
BLOOMINGTON –A two-day trial in Monroe Circuit Court last week, cleared hunter Michael Nanny, of Gosport of any wrongdoing.
Nanny was accused of two counts of criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon.
Nanny was accused of firing his New England-brand 12-gauge shotgun while turkey hunting just before dawn on Sunday, April 29, 2018, leaving two other Gosport men injured.
According to Indiana Conservation officers the victims, a 43-year-old man, and a 48-year-old man were turkey hunting around 6:40 a.m. on private property in northwest Monroe County.
As they hunted, another hunter was walking along the field line when hesaw and heard what he thought to be a turkey, and fired in the direction ofthe two men.
Officials said the men were struck but neither man’s injuries…
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Man paralyzed after accident learns to hunt in wheelchair
https://www.wtoc.com/2021/06/03/man-paralyzed-after-accident-learns-hunt-wheelchair/
Timeout 10 seconds.Man paralyzed after accident learns to hunt in wheelchairBy Dal Cannady| June 3, 2021 at 6:57 PM EDT – Updated June 3 at 6:57 PM
SCREVEN COUNTY, Ga. (WTOC) – A Screven County man has spent decades learning how to hunt and fish again after a devastating injury.
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Jason Beard could have let his tragedy separate him from his passion for the outdoors. But he found resources, in people and products to help him overcome. His foundations help share that with others.
Beard became paralyzed in a diving accident the summer he graduated high school. During his rehab, he heard about adaptive hunting equipment for people in wheelchairs.
“It started early on, but technology has definitely evolved since then. They have track chairs now, shooting rests…
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Endangered Right Whales Are Shrinking. Scientists Blame Commercial Fishing Gear
June 3, 202111:06 AM ET
Scientists from NOAA Fisheries Service approach a young North Atlantic right whale in order to disentangle it. New research shows whales with severe entanglements in rope and fishing gear are experiencing stunted growth, and body lengths have been decreasing since 1981.NOAA News Archive 011811
North Atlantic right whales now grow smaller than they did 40 years ago, and new research suggests a leading cause is the damage human activity inflicts on the critically endangered mammals.
The findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, reveal that when fully grown, a North Atlantic right whale born today would be expected to be about one meter shorter than a whale born in 1980. Currently, full-grown members of the species average 13 to 14 meters in length (43 to 46 feet).
“The first inkling that we had came from the folks who were collecting the data in the field, where, as the story goes, they saw what looked to be a really young whale, a calf, or maybe one- or two-year-old,” said Joshua Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Marine Mammal and Turtle Division and lead author of the new study. “But it turns out that they were actually 5-year-old or 10-year-old whales that were smaller than a typical 2-year-old.”
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A photo illustration demonstrates how much shorter a North Atlantic right whale born in recent years would be compared to one born years earlier. In each image, the outline shows how long researchers expected each whale to be had it been born in 1981. “It’s just astonishing,” said Joshua Stewart, lead author on the paper.Madeline Wukusick
The research, with contributions from scientists with the New England Aquarium, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Oregon State University, indicated that a prime reason for the animals’ recent stunted growth is entanglement in rope and fishing gear.
David Attenborough Netflix documentary: Australian scientists break down in tears over climate crisis
Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet shows the toll the demise of the Earth’s natural places is having on the people who study them
Graham Readfearn@readfearnThu 3 Jun 2021 13.30 EDT
One of Australia’s leading coral reef scientists is seen breaking down in tears at the decline of the Great Barrier Reef during a new Sir David Attenborough documentary to be released globally on Friday evening.
Prof Terry Hughes is recounting three coral bleaching monitoring missions in 2016, 2017 and 2020 when he says: “It’s a job I hoped I would never have to do because it’s actually very confronting …” before tears cut him short.
The emotional scene comes during the new Netflix documentary, Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, and shows the toll the demise of the planet’s natural places is having on some of the people who study them.
The film visits scientists working on melting ice, the degradation of the Amazon, and the loss of biodiversity, and looks at a 2019/2020 “summer from hell” for Australia that featured unprecedented bushfires and the most widespread bleaching of corals ever recorded on the Great Barrier reef.
The 70-minute film features another Australian scientist, Dr Daniella Teixeira, walking through a blackened landscape where she was working to conserve endangered glossy black cockatoos.
“There’s no sign of any wildlife at all,” says Teixeira, with footage of twisted and burnt animals and trees turned to charcoal. “There’s nothing left.”
The documentary, fronted by Attenborough, is centred on the research of Swedish scientist Prof Johan Rockström, whose work looks at the concept of tipping points and boundaries in different systems around the planet, such as the polar regions, the Earth’s biodiversity and the climate.
Netflix says the film documents “the most important scientific discovery of our time – that humanity has pushed Earth beyond the boundaries that have kept Earth stable for 10,000 years, since the dawn of civilisation.”Advertisement
Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes,warn scientistshttps://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_109985475https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_1728788371https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_1797282270
Hughes has become a high-profile scientific figure in Australia for his research on the complex impacts of global heating on the world’s biggest reef system and his monitoring flights to document mass bleaching.
“In big thermal extremes like we’ve been seeing during mass bleaching events in recent decades [corals] can actually die very very quickly. They cook,” he says in the documentary.
Hughes told the Guardian that “if anything I think the emotional response has lessened over time” and that the 2016 bleaching event in the north of the reef “was the most confronting”.
“But it’s still deeply saddening,” he said.
He said Rockström’s research, which he has collaborated on, was “simple and powerful” and showed how the world was on a “trajectory that is not sustainable”.
“You can easily transgress a tipping point and not notice it for a couple of decades,” he said, adding he thought the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had probably reached a tipping point for coral reefs in the 1980s.
Hughes, of James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said the black summer bushfires and coral bleaching “points to Australia’s vulnerability”.
In the documentary, Attenborough says: “We are heading for a future where the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard.”
He describes Australia’s 2019/20 summer as “a summer from hell, fuelled by record-breaking temperatures and drought”.
Texeira, from the University of Queensland, is filmed in February 2020 returning to sites on Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast where she was studying endangered glossy black cockatoos.
She finds one of the nests erected to help the birds on a fallen tree with an iron plate around the trunk to stop possums climbing up and attacking the young.
With the iron buckled from the heat and the nest melted, Texeira says: “They weren’t enough to save them.”
She told the Guardian: “There are days when I still get overwhelmed. At the end of the day, we’re humans and we have emotions.”
She had been visiting the island for four years and the fires had come just as she was completing her PhD.
“I have come out the other side now but it has really made me more focused on the urgency of the problems and how we as scientists can make changes now.”
- Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet is available on Netflix on 4 June
Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists
Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of heating, with severe long-term effects
Damian Carrington Environment editor@dpcarringtonThu 3 Jun 2021 12.34 EDT
Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.
Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.
The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.AdvertisementUS DoJ investigating postmaster general overpolitical fundraisinghttps://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_1133111315https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_693384201https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.462.0_en.html#goog_475190248
The study showed that the interactions between these climate systems can lower the critical temperature thresholds at which each tipping point is passed. It found that ice sheets are potential starting points for tipping cascades, with the Atlantic currents acting as a transmitter and eventually affecting the Amazon.
“We provide a risk analysis, not a prediction, but our findings still raise concern,” said Prof Ricarda Winkelmann, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany. “[Our findings] might mean we have less time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and still prevent tipping processes.”
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere required to push temperatures beyond the thresholds could be reached in the very near future, she said. “In the next years or decades, we might be committing future generations to really severe consequences.” These could include many metres of sea-level rise from ice melting, affecting scores of coastal cities.
“We’re shifting the odds, and not in our favour – the risk clearly is increasing the more we heat our planet,” said Jonathan Donges, also at PIK and part of the research team.
In May, scientists reported that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet was on the brink of a tipping point. A 2019 analysis led by Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter suggested the world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, resulting in what the researchers called “an existential threat to civilisation”.
The climate crisis may also mean much of the Amazon is close to a tipping point, at which carbon-storing forest is replaced by savannah, researchers have warned. The ocean currents of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), of which the Gulf Stream is an important part and keeps western Europe mild, are at their weakest in more than a millennium.
The research, published in the journal Earth System Dynamics, used a new type of climate model because existing models are very complex and require huge computing power, making them expensive to run many times. Instead, the researchers used an approach that focused specifically on how the temperature thresholds for the tipping points changed as the systems interacted, allowing them to run the 3m simulations.
An example of the complex chain of interactions the researchers tracked is the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This releases fresh water into the ocean and slows down the AMOC, which is driven partly by dense, salty water being pulled down towards the ocean floor. A weaker AMOC means less heat is transported from the tropics towards the north pole, which in turn leads to warmer waters in the Southern Ocean. This can then destabilise ice sheets in Antarctica, which pushes up global sea level and causes more melting at the edges of the Greenland ice sheet.
“The study suggests that below 2C of global warming – ie in the Paris agreement target range – there could still be a significant risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points,” said Lenton. “What the new study doesn’t do is unpack the timescale over which tipping points changes and cascades could unfold – instead it focuses on the eventual consequences. The results should be viewed as ‘commitments’ that we may be making soon to potentially irreversible changes and cascades, leaving as a grim legacy to future generations.”
However, the chance of a cascade of tipping points leading to a runaway greenhouse effect, where the planet gets ever hotter even if humanity stops carbon emissions, is extremely unlikely, according to Prof Anders Levermann, also at PIK but not involved in the new work. “The Earth will get as warm as we make it, which means we’re the ones [that must] stop it,” he said.
The walkin’ dead…
